Research

The Susan Samueli Center for Integrative Medicine is committed to research, education and clinical care. This tripartite mission mutually reinforces each area of activity.

For example, we train students and postdoctoral scholars from the United States and China, as well as clinical practitioners, in our laboratories. In turn, our research helps guide our clinical protocols and gives us an opportunity to train integrative practitioners in leading-edge techniques that can be used to improve clinical outcomes. Feedback from participants in our courses, clinicians and our patients helps guide our research protocols by giving us practical direction.

The center has a number of basic and more clinically oriented research protocols.

Although clinical application is certainly of much interest and importance in furthering our understanding of the clinical value of the many and varied integrative medical practices, the center concentrates on providing a fundamental and mechanistic understanding in several areas.

We have concentrated our research in a few areas so that we can add meaningfully to the literature. This approach is highly prized by the Western or allopathic medical community, and increasingly is being embraced by integrative medical practitioners, in part because it allows an evidence-based approach to healthcare and, because it seeks to answer the fundamental questions about how these therapies work, how they can be optimized and whether their influence is simply a placebo effect. These questions are frequently raised by mainstream scientists and clinicians.

The center's major area of emphasis is in traditional Chinese or Oriental medicine. This includes studies of acupuncture, herbals, qigong and tai chi.

The following is a partial listing of ongoing research areas at the Samueli Center:

Acupuncture and electroacupuncture neurobiological influence on the cardiovascular system and blood pressure